Update

This only seems to be happening when connecting with TightVNC viewer on Winodws. I tried different clients now and none of them showed that issue on first glance...

Question

I just installed a fresh Ubuntu 22.04 and am having a very weird issue:

When entering my password in any kind of password field, the shift key gets stuck when reaching the first special character in my pwd & I cannot "unstuck" it afterwards.

What that means:

• I can only type ALL UPPER CASE from that moment on
• I cannot select single items in file explorer anymore. It only does "range selection" when clicking on single items as when normally doing shift+click.
• I cannot enter any passwords (correctly) anymore
• Even though this is "triggered" by entering the pwd over VNC, it also affects my locally, physically connected keyboard as that is also in this "shift stuck" mode from now on

The only way I found (until now) to get out of this is state is to reboot the whole machine.
I did try the following without any luck:

• Press shift and/or caps lock (once, multiple times, "double tap", combined, ...)
• Press shift+caps lock (as proposed here)
• Change active keyboard layout (which has another weird side effect, see below)
• Go to lock screen & re-login (using the on screen keyboard)
• Toggle "sticky keys" accessibility setting

I did not try to log out the user as I cannot use VNC anymore after doing that, so that wouldn't help me as I mostly control the computer via VNC.

Here are some observations I made so far:

• The key gets stuck when reaching the first special character in the pwd.
  E.g. when entering the password on the lock screen with pwd visible, I see the following:
  mySpecial&PASSWORD where everything after the first & gets capitalized erroneously.
• I only observed this in the following situations (until now):
  • Enter pwd on lock screen (always)
  • Enter pwd in terminal after running command with sudo (most of the time, not always...)
  • Enter pwd in the graphical "Authentication required" dialog
  • Enter pwd in login screen of an Ubuntu virtual machine running in VirtualBox.
    Yep, entering the password inside the virtual machine makes the shift key stuck on the host 😲
• This does not happen when entering text with special characters somewhere else (VSCode, terminal, ...)
• This only happens when entering the pwd with my physical keyboard (via VNC).
  E.g. I can copy the pwd on my local machine to the clipboard & paste it into the lock screen of the remote screen without any issues.
• This only happens when connected via Ubuntu's built in VNC server. I'm connected via TightVNC viewer on Win 10 which has been working flawless for many years now and I did not try any other client (so far).
  This does not happen, when typing the pwd with the locally/physically connected keyboard.
• Ubuntu's built in on screen keyboard is not affected, i.e. I could use it to enter "normal" text when in this state
• Changing the keyboard layout when in this state (e.g. from de to en& back) results in the following:
  • Shift doesn't seem to be stuck anymore. E.g. single selection in file explorer is working normally afterwards
  • I can only type lower case after doing so 😲

I would really appreciate some help with that. Ideally we can find a way to prevent this from happening in the first place but I'd already be happy with a way to "unstuck shift" when in this state without having to reboot the machine.

As mentioned before, I'm controlling this pc almost exclusively via VNC which is rather impossible ATM.

Before this fresh installation, I was using x11vnc on 20.04 and did not have any of those issues. However, I can't really go back to this setup as I wasn't able to make x11vnc work in 22.04 (different topic) and other options like xrdp also came with some "show stopper issues" which I couldn't fully work around (until now)...